Miranda turned away from the mirror. “I don’t like this blame culture,” she whispered. “I don’t like it at all.”
She checked Lily’s watch. It was midnight in Haiti. The ticking of the watch grew very loud; she wished it would not tick so loudly. She fumbled across the room to put on a CD, but she had taken it out and put it back in, pressed play three times before she realised there was nothing wrong with it, it played every time she pressed the button. There was Ella Fitzgerald, whispering a tisket a tasket. She gritted her teeth. She needed the sound of the watch stopped; she couldn’t hear the music for the sound of the watch. She knelt on the floor and slammed her wrist against it.
Tick, tick
(break it break it)
tick, tick
It was the pain that made her realise what she was doing. She undid the watch clasp, inspected it for damage, then put it on the table and rubbed her swollen wrist. Then she felt for her pills, cursing her hand for trembling so much. She put her steady hand over her trembling hand, to no effect. She lay down and didn’t want to shut her eyes. With the curtains drawn it could almost be night. But she heard someone talking to Luc downstairs, she heard the clatter of cutlery, she heard the whir of
the lift
broke down in the night. No one knew what time. The timing became important when Azwer and Ezma couldn’t find their older daughter in the morning.
Luc had had the attic converted into two large, low rooms. Azwer and Ezma slept in one, while Deme and her little sister, Suryaz, slept in a double bed in the second room. Deme was ten and Suryaz was seven. The two of them went about with their hands joined, smiling and full of secrets so simple that they were given up if asked after. Deme and Suryaz hopped more than they walked; it was always as if they had just left the site of some mirth particular to them. They babbled in prettily accented voices. The combination of their near-identical manes of curly hair and their mother’s tendency to zip them into similarly patterned dresses meant that Suryaz had an air of having been formed without detail. Deme was the oldest, so you looked at her first.
Both girls admitted that they had spent the day before playing around with the lift, pressing buttons for three floors all at once, holding the Door Open button until the lift zinged with confusion. That was reason enough for the lift to later get confused and try to travel unbidden from first floor to second, grinding to a halt between the two. But why was Deme standing in the corner of the lift when Luc, Azwer and the technician pried the doors open? She was standing, not sitting or kneeling. They found her in the back left corner, where there once had been a hole in the floor, and she was standing on tiptoe, so close to the Alarm button, looking at it in fact, her eyes wide as if all night she had been sinking and all night a stubborn thing in her had kept her on her feet.
“I tucked her into bed with Suryaz,” Ezma kept repeating. “I did, didn’t I,” she said to Suryaz, who looked and looked and then shrugged. Ezma hissed at her, but Suryaz would say nothing. At first Deme wouldn’t talk either, then when Ezma shouted at her, Deme spat a large piece of Suryaz’s Lego out into her hand and tried her best to answer the questions that everyone levelled at her, even Eliot, who tugged her ponytail and teased her about her “midnight journey.” The only reply Deme ventured was that she didn’t know.
“Why did you get into the lift so late, when everyone was sleeping?”
“I don’t know.”
“Deme, where is your sense? Why didn’t you just ring the alarm?”
“I don’t know.”
Miranda asked, “Deme are you alright?”
Deme and Suryaz leant on each other and Suryaz said, “Thank you, she is alright.”
Miranda, Luc and Eliot slept on the third floor; above the guests but below the housekeepers. Miranda told Eliot: “I heard someone crying last night. But I thought I was just remembering the clinic.”
Or herself, she had thought she was hearing herself.
•
Later in the morning Miranda opened her wardrobe and found it full of clammy ghosts that hovered around her body when she put them on. The cold trickled down in the gaps between the material and her chest. Scarecrow girl. She felt proud and nauseous, chosen and moulded by hands that froze. She drifted downstairs to find her father, who was stalking around a newly vacated guest room with a checklist. Winter had licked every window in the house and left them smeared with fog. “Nothing fits me anymore,” she said, turning in a slow circle before him, hoping for his horror. “I’ll need some new clothes.”
Her father took her in coolly.
“That is true,” he said.
Together they searched the dressing table and desk drawers in his bedroom until they found a gilt-coloured card with the address of a boutique in Notting Hill printed on it. It was a boutique that Lily had liked for dresses, so Luc told Ezma and Azwer that he would be out for the afternoon and drove Miranda into London.
Dress shopping took longer than she had expected. It took the whole afternoon. Luc refused Miranda every dress she tried on. Each time he shook his head she gauged the extent of his dislike for the dress by checking whether he had raised one eyebrow or both.
“What’s wrong with this one?” she’d ask. Mid-length sleeves, a demure hemline, a keyhole collar.
“You know you already have one just like that.”
“But—”
Distress showed dimly in his eyes. “Let me see the next one, please.”
They moved with increasing disheartenment from shop to shop, hands in their coat pockets, looking at the floor more than they looked at the clothes, and finally, knowing that her only condition was that her dresses be black, he swiftly selected dresses off the racks for her to try, with the reasoning that he was more likely to approve an outfit if he’d chosen it.
She was embarrassed; other shoppers were trying to guess at their relationship. He looked younger than he was. She took every opportunity to say “Father” to him, and hated herself for sounding like such a fool, Father-Father-Father.
When she tried on the last dress in the pile he’d built up, she was sure he would like it. He had to. It didn’t look like anything she already had, the skirt flared wonderfully, and there was the sweet ribbon bow at the waist. It was a dress to be worn by the sort of girl who’d check that no one was looking, then skip down a quiet street instead of walking, just so the fun of it was hers alone. She looked around the corner of the fitting-room door and saw her father standing with his hands in his pockets, his tie removed and folded into a pocket of his crumpled suit, where part of it unfurled like a yellow-and-blue-striped tongue. A woman who had come shopping alone seemed to be asking his advice on the dress she’d tried on. He nodded and smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners, before giving the woman’s dress a thumbs-up, which made Miranda laugh because her father only gave things a thumbs-up when he thought they were stupid and populist. The woman touched his arm and said thank you.
Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father’s legs gone, the woman’s torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows. Lily had taken her to a doll hospital in New York once. Neat rooms with bright, hard looking wallpaper tacked precisely into each corner like plastic, chests of drawers with lace cloths on top, the smell of pot-pourri lined with sawdust. Only the repaired dolls were on view
(Father, let’s go to the doll hospital and get you repaired)
she didn’t know where the thought had come from, she probably had to be careful because she had been mad.